The Passion of Artemisia Read Free

look around. From an upstairs window, a chamber pot splashed down not three steps ahead of me.

    The trial didn’t end. Whenever I was summoned, I had to go and sit through more accusations and lies. It drove me mad that I couldn’t work. When Papa pulled off the bandages to change them, the raw grooves around the base of each fingerbled again. When they dried, if I bent them even slightly, the crusted blood cracked. I couldn’t hold a brush or a spoon. Papa told Tuzia to feed me. Ever since Mother died, Tuzia had wanted Papa’s love, not just his bed. She was jealous of his love for me. That’s why she let Agostino in. Better to starve than to let her feed me, and so I didn’t eat. Papa came home one afternoon raging that Tuzia had betrayed me in court. She had testified that she saw a stream of men enter my rooms, so he put her out on the street and asked our neighbor, Porzia Stiattesi, to feed me.
    I tried to keep my fingers straight so they would heal and I could paint again. Still, they festered and oozed, and then the maddening itching began. All I could do was to pace the house, stare out windows, and study my rough sketches for my Judith, the heroine who saved the Jewish people. Papa had told me the story when he painted her. She stole into the enemy camp pretending to seduce the Assyrian tyrant, Holofernes, and got him drunk. She teased him, delaying the lovemaking, pouring him more wine until he fell asleep. Then she cut off his head and showed it to his soldiers the next day, and the army fled. That’s the kind of woman I wanted to paint. Papa’s Judith was so angelic and delicate she could never have done the deed without the intervention of God.
    One morning a fishmonger came through our narrow Via della Croce carrying two baskets of dried fish. She had her sleeves rolled up and her muscular arms were thick and ropey like the veined arm of Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli. That’s what Judith’s arms had to be—thicker and stronger than I’d sketched them, with her sleeves pushed up too, ready for a bloodbath, stiff with determination and repugnance as she drove his steel blade through his neck. And Judith’s maidservant, Abra, also had to have strong arms to bear down on the tyrant’s chest. But more than arms, myJudith would have one knee up on the tyrant’s bed, hacking like a farm wife slaughtering a pig.
    The fish hawker sang out “Cefalo, baccalà” and laughed uproariously at some children playing in the street. She was utterly free, and I envied her, for a moment. Not that I wanted to be a fishwife. I just didn’t want to spend my whole life confined at home to avoid humiliation.
    I put on a shawl and tucked my hands inside, took side streets and crossed the large piazza to the church of Santa Maria del Popolo. Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul hung in a small chapel there. I studied his chiaroscuro, how he used bright light right against darkness, and I yearned to try it myself. Saint Paul was lying on his back at the moment of his conversion, head and shoulders forward in the picture plane and his body foreshortened. I could do Holofernes like that, with his head practically bursting through the canvas toward the viewer, upside down, at an impossible angle if it were fully attached, but still living, taking his last horrific breath as he thrust his fist into Abra’s chin.
    I remembered being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio’s Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man’s neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn’t imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible—determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders. Not relishing the act, just getting it done. And his thoughts too. Confusion and terror.